Please, don't throw the "bill for the bullet goes back to the family" complaint at me. It only serves to confuse the issue, and since China's taxes are so damn low, I'm not suprised the justice department will bill the condemned's family. In any case, it is a mere distraction to the real point of the debate.

Some crimes deserve extra punishment. Are you telling me a muderer is fit to live for decades in a prison, spending our money? First of all, its cost-ineffective. Secondly, some people don't deserve to live. Since punishment increases as the severity of the crime goes up, the death penalty is the harshest penalty possible. Seriously, are you telling me that rapists, after submitting their victims to lifelong psychological torment, deserve to live in a comfy little cell for 50 years? I think not.

Today, Britain remains the only country in western Europe where a return to capital punishment is regularly and seriously proposed. In recent years bills to restore the death penalty for all murderers or the murderers of police officers have been introduced in the House of Commons by Conservative benchers every time they have had the chance.

The back-benchers usually emphasise that they are not seeking mere revenge and that capital punishment is a better deterrent than imprisonment. They have, however, never managed to produce any concrete evidence for this. Instead they have cool-headedly tried to misinterpret the actual statistics, for example by comparing the pre-abolition murder rate with the naturally much higher post-abolition homicide figure.

The rise of international terrorism in the seventies and eighties led to MPs' invoking the specific threat of terrorist acts in defending hanging. But their opponents have been quick to point out that terrorist murders are the ones for which the death penalty is most inappropriate: first, the martyrdom created by execution may actually entice terrorists to commit murder to win publicity for their cause, and second, the great number of people involved in terrorism cases might result in especially tremendous miscarriages of justice.

The pro-hanging people are a vociferous minority, even within those who vote Conservative. The 1992 British Election Study indicates that only 49 per cent of Conservative supporters would endorse the restoration of hanging. The fact is that there is no real threat of a person being judicially hanged in Britain ever again, even for high treason or piracy on the high seas, the two remaining capital offences unaffected by the Murder Act.

In addition, Pope John Paul II (and by association the worldwide Roman Catholic Church) is morally opposed to capital punishment under any circumstances, as it qualifies as the taking of human life by human hands.

The following is from the 2000 European Union Annual Report on Human Rights:

Capital punishment raises a range of philosophical, religious, political and criminological questions. The EU countries have all concluded that the death penalty is a uniquely inhuman and irreversible punishment.

Even highly advanced legal systems, which rest upon the principle of the rule of law, including the principle of due process, are not immune to miscarriages of justice, for example through different interpretations of the law, convictions based on unreliable evidence, or a lack of adequate legal representation. This inevitably leads to the execution of the innocent. And the irreversible nature of capital punishment removes any possibility of correcting such miscarriages of justice.

Nor is there sufficient justification on either criminal or criminological grounds for maintaining capital punishment. Studies have failed to demonstrate scientifically that the death penalty deters crime any more effectively than other forms of punishment, such as life imprisonment. And capital punishment assumes that those convicted of crimes are incapable of rehabilitation. The European Union is therefore opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. This view is increasingly shared throughout the international community. To date some 108 countries have abolished the death penalty in law (86 States) or in practice (22 States). And neither the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court nor the United Nations Security Council resolutions establishing the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda include any provision for the death penalty even for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

The EU has therefore agreed to promote universal abolition of the death penalty.